Civicist: How Movements Organize Now: Notes on the Challenges of Rapid Growth

If you haven’t noticed already, we are living through a movement moment. Triggered by the election of Donald Trump and his combustive personality and policy moves, millions of Americans are in motion, forming and joining groups, rallying, signing and sharing petitions, and searching for ways to demonstrate their opposition. Thousands of new local community groups have formed, with at least 7,000 local groups inspired by the Indivisible Guide; 5,000 Huddles (small groups) spawned by the Women’s March; at least a thousand more conjured into existence by Meetup.com. Dozens and dozens of specialized groups have also been created—the ActionAlliance counts more than 80 just focused on collecting and sharing action alerts for concerned citizens. Here at Civic Hall, we’ve been building a catalogue of many of these efforts focused on simply tracking who is doing what, by function, and we’ve run out of letters of the alphabet to enumerate all the columns in our “Resist Projects” spreadsheet (a work in progress, aided by research from the good folks at Movement2017.org).